"Just beat it!" Popular Legacies of Cultural Revolution Culture

The Asian Pacific Studies Institute at Duke University presents the lecture "Just beat it!- Popular Legacies of Cultural Revolution" by Barbara Mittler from the University of Heidelberg and Heidelberg Center for Transcultural Studies.

How come that model works and revolutionary songs from the Cultural Revolution are rather popular in contemporary China? Why is it that this propaganda art reappears in Karaoke Bars, on Home-Videos? Why is it that for a while in the early 2000s, Mao’s portrait dangled in almost every taxi and that it is part and parcel, today, in high-market as well as popular accessories? Why are there numerous Chinese websites featuring memories of Cultural Revolution propaganda art? Why do people get married in “Cultural Revolution Style” today? Why, after all, do people appreciate the products of a period in Chinese history which has been known for its radical politics and the horrors it inflicted, especially, if by no means only on intellectuals? These are some of the questions addressed in a recently published book, Barbara Mittler’s A Continuous Revolution: Making Sense of Cultural Revolution Culture. An introduction to the book and the online exhibition and database which accompanies it, and which includes many propaganda products from the Cultural Revolution and their contemporary parodies as well as their predecessors, will attempt to answer some of these questions.

Professor Barbara Mittler holds a Chair in Chinese Studies at the Institute of Chinese Studies, University of Heidelberg and is Director of the Cluster of Excellence at the University of Heidelberg “Asia and Europe in a Global Context.” She began her studies of Sinology at the University of Oxford (MA Oxon 1990), and has spent research periods in Taiwan, the People’s Republic of China, Hong Kong and at Harvard University. Her PhD (1994) and her habilitation (post-doctoral thesis, 1998) are both from Heidelberg. In 2000, she received the Heinz-Maier-Leibnitz-Prize for young and outstanding scholars by the German Research Foundation and the German Ministry of Culture. Between 2002 and 2004, she was a recipient of a Heisenberg Fellowship awarded by the German Research Foundation. In 2008, she was elected member of the National Academy of Sciences LEOPOLDINA and, more recently, in 2013, the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences. In 2009, she won the Henry Allen Moe Prize in the Humanities, American Philosophical Society, and most recently, in 2013, her book-length study of the Chinese Cultural Revolution has won the Fairbank Prize by the American Historical Association. Her research focuses on cultural production in (greater) China covering a wide range of topics from music to visual and historical print media in China's long modernity.